Photo Workshop for Chinese Students 1

Last week I delivered my first photography workshop to visiting Chinese students. It was a large group of 37 keen and attentive learners and came with its own challenges.

The workshop was delivered at Swansea University, lasted a full day and provided some technological problems upon arrival. The visitors’ WiFi was not working, and as this was a smartphone photography workshop and the students would be submitting photos, WiFi was essential.

I began before the solution was apparent with an attention grabbing ice breaker, followed by 10 Smartphone Photography tips. We then covered ‘How to see a photo’, which is not as easy as it might appear. This centred upon the differences between how we see and how a camera sees and then explored some of the barriers to truly seeing what is in front of us.

Before I set the students their photographic challenge I went through 7 Elements of Visual Design to build upon their newly acquired knowledge of how a camera sees. We discussed colour, line, shape, form, space, texture and pattern. Fortunately during this period we had sorted out an alternative WiFi solution and were ready for the competition.

Photo Marathon

Over the rest of the workshop, with an intermission for lunch, the students were set a Photo Marathon challenge. This consisted of six topics and six photos in a limited time. The students were paired up and each pair submitted 6 photos to brilliantly illustrate the 6 topics.

The topics in order were: Your Entry Number, Happy, Up, Blue, Look and New Meets Old. I was helped with all the downloading and labelling by Zhang Meng Yu (one of the students – thanks!) and my daughter India.

Once everything was collated India and I independently judged our top three in each category, then agreed upon our topic winners and overall winner. The 6 topic winning photos are below and a couple of photos of the winner and topic winners below that.

It is all happening again on Wednesday 5th April. Let’s hope it’s sunny this time!